After I retired in 1987 I had decided to start acting again if the opportunity arose. I therefore tried to make contact again with people from earlier in my life. But that wasn't so easy. The casting staff from the old days, who knew every actor and every actress and worked with the directors on developing television dramas, had gone. Their work had been largely taken over by casting agencies, which were sub-contracted to independent producers who were sub-contracted in turn to the broadcasting companies, which no longer made their own films. The State Employment Offices had also set up departments for unemployed performing artists in some big cities. None of these casting agencies could do anything with me. The broadcasting companies only had casting units for radio. I knocked at the door of all the broadcasting companies that I had worked for in the past. But I found very few familiar faces, and they were amazed that I was still around at all. It was true that once I became a journalist I had made myself scarce.

Later, when I was a senior civil servant, that kind of activity was out of the question. I had simply been out of the performing arts for too long. In the theaters there were new managers and directors, or the theaters had disappeared. But behold, the Grenzlandtheater in Aachen was looking for a black actor for a leading role, and I was just the man. At the first rehearsal for Athol Fugard's “Master Harold”… and the Boys it turned out that the manager of the theater, Karl-Heinz Walther, who was also directing, had worked with me thirty years before in the early days of television. We had changed so much that we didn't recognize each other at first. My return to the theater had succeeded, and soon other theaters got in touch and offered me roles that I would never have gotten in the old days. It's true that there were still hardly any roles for black actors on the German theater scene. There were two roles I would have loved to play: the scheming Mulay Hassan in Schiller's Fiesco and Shakespeare's Othello.